


History in Fire

by Aerithari



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 13:59:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4837868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerithari/pseuds/Aerithari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lady Surana has arrived at Skyhold, and rumors of Cullen’s past buzz in his ears again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	History in Fire

**Author's Note:**

> written before DA:I came out, but I still find it relevant I guess. Originally posted on tumblr as Witchfall. witchfall.tumblr.com

Of course Cullen _thinks_ about it. The past infiltrates the Hold like an unwelcome buzzing in the ear. The world is ending. Old secrets slip through the cracks in the sky. People talk.

When Lady Surana arrived at Skyhold, settled primly on an ivory mare, addressing the guards with a sizzling, magisterial air, it was impossible not to talk about her. Her cobalt blue Warden armor draped on her tiny frame like a threat— _I look relaxed but I can kill you without thinking twice._

She is not his secret. She is a white-hot point in time, a blessedly short, feverish flash that flushed out the entirety of him. People try and talk about it like they know, as if he has a _thing_ for _magical elves_. He digs his fingertips into his armored palms. There had been nothing there. She took it when she left, because when she’s gone, there’s nothing left but the illusion you invented about her.

Aeri Lavellan is everything that is real. Aeri Lavellan is whole.

He remembers how his skin turned cold with sweat the first time he watched Nadia Surana. She burned bright, high as the summer sun, and you felt her because you had no choice. He yearned, like a sprout waiting for the day to break. She watched you with dagger blue eyes and laughed like fireworks. She crackled with power and hope and anger and confidence. She owned that tower, as much as any apprentice could. But Maker, her rage. She spited every god alive for putting her in a cage. She’d almost been broken, but then the blood mage…

Her old friend and ill-luck cohort. Impossible not to see. Jowan was so in love with her, he practically fell all over himself to take blame for her pranks in their early teen years, even though she hated when he did that because that wasn’t the point. Cullen saw it in him, like recognizing a man of arms.

Jowan grew out of it quickly. Cullen did not, and was left to deal with the brunt of the ashes left in Surana’s wake. It was unsettled and aching—a love brutally killed by how empty it was.

That is the story nobody seems interested in.

–

Aeri watches him from across the war table. The woman lives her life analyzing boundaries. Her mouth twitches in an uncertain frown, as if she is unsure how to proceed. The wall is behind him, the woman he loves hovers in front of him, and he feels boxed in.

“It’s not even her,” he begins. It feels like he is starting in the middle, but he’s not sure how to stop now. “I don’t care that Lady Surana is here.”

“I know that.”

“She is a perfectly fine woman, but I did not and do not feel the way about her that everyone in the Keep seems to be implying.”

Aeri regards him with an even gaze, as unruffled as the dawn. “That does not matter to me,” she says softly.

“I did feel something for her, but it would not—it would not have been anything.”

Aeri nods in response. He is fighting through a massive stone wall to get to what he needs to say. He realizes he is clenching his jaw.

“It’s like the same people, the same events, follow me always.” He leans over the war table, hands and arms taut as he presses them into the wood, fingertips curling against grain. “Disaster following at every turn. Women I meet, seemingly on accident, changing or destroying the world as we know it. It’s almost a joke. I run from fire to fire without realizing I’m burning.”

“And now you are here.”

Aeri Lavellan is the mist in the forest—a sheet of immutable gray that touches all and stretches beyond time. She’s the essential warmth of a campfire. She is also the barren glare of the truth, staring back at you in the mirror.

“And now I am here,” he whispers.

He turns his gaze up at her. He can see it now, in her eyes, a familiar yearning. The wells within her run deep and cold—a great deluge, pressed further and further inward, compressed into a single channel in the heart. A melancholy that only ever bubbled forth when they were alone. A helplessness.

Nothing about them, in theory, should work, but for this—a deep desire for peace.

“Will you come here?” he asks. His voice is low.

She glances behind her, and then decides.

She circles around the table. She walks until she is toe-to-toe with him, close enough for their chests to touch, but not quite. She gently puts her hands on both sides of his face. Her right thumb rubs the very edge of the scar on his lip. He can count each of her freckles.

Everything between them works. When he looks at her, he feels like himself.

“Ma vhenan,” she whispers. “I will never let the fire catch you.”

He wraps his arms around her lower back and presses his face into the unkempt auburn hair flying about her shoulder.

She finally closes the space between them and snakes her thin arms around his neck. She is careful about touch, as if anything she touches on accident will dissolve before her eyes. Everything about her is planned and deliberate.

“I will never let you fall,” she says.

He breathes.

_I love you more than my own life._

He knows it is true, this time.


End file.
